These tools will no longer be maintained as of December 31, 2024. Archived website can be found here. PubMed4Hh GitHub repository can be found here. Contact NLM Customer Service if you have questions.


Pubmed for Handhelds

PUBMED FOR HANDHELDS

Search MEDLINE/PubMed

  • Title: Emil Kraepelin's ideas on transcultural psychiatry.
    Author: Steinberg H.
    Journal: Australas Psychiatry; 2015 Oct; 23(5):531-5. PubMed ID: 26129818.
    Abstract:
    OBJECTIVE: Prevailing degeneration theory and an increasing number of people in inpatient mental treatment aroused the famous German psychiatrist Emil Kraepelin's (1856-1926) interest to investigate whether the mental illnesses typical for Europe were also characteristic for 'primitive peoples'. He thus dedicated a period spent in the Dutch East Indies (Java) in 1904 to transcultural psychiatric research. This paper endeavours to compile Kraepelin's key findings, aiming to make readers aware of what kind of transcultural research Kraepelin did and what conclusions he came up with. At the same time it provides some background for the question of whether Kraepelin can really be referred to as the founder of transcultural psychiatry. CONCLUSION: Kraepelin assumed that illnesses with exterior causes depended on the type of stimulants widely used in a given culture. Since he found little evidence for progressive paralysis, he concluded that European brains were particularly prone to sequelae of syphilis. For endogenous psychoses he postulated differences in both symptoms and courses, depressions being rarer and milder, and ceasing sooner. By contrast, he found dementia praecox (mainly covered by the concept of schizophrenias later) to be the most prevalent mental illness in Java, explicitly different in form from that in Europe.
    [Abstract] [Full Text] [Related] [New Search]